Why is an apostrophe used in your race event title?

We hear this quite a lot – ‘We love your event but why are you wrongly using an apostrophe in Night of the 10,000m PB’s?

We are aware of the standard use of an apostrophe, but for us it comes down to clarity when using individual letters and to explain further please see the wise words of the Times journalist Oliver Kamm from his column ‘The Pedant’.

“This is a question not of grammar but of orthography: the conventions for writing a language. It may sound an obvious point but surprisingly it’s not always clear to zealots for “correct” English”.

“The apostrophe has no grammatical function and is certainly not essential to meaning. Sure, there are right and wrong ways of using an apostrophe but the mark is just an orthographical convenience. The apostrophe doesn’t exist in the spoken language (the cat’s bowl is pronounced the same way as the cats’ bowl) but meaning doesn’t thereby break down. Indeed, it didn’t exist in written English either till the 16th century, when it entered the language from French as a printer’s mark to denote an elision’.

“Gradually the apostrophe was adopted as a genitive marker too. But the conventions for its use only settled down in their current form in the age of mechanised printing from the early 19th century. Inconsistencies abound. The apostrophe in Mary’s denotes possession but it doesn’t in it’s. That’s an accident of history; there’s no logic to it. Writers commonly used it’s as a possessive between the 17th and 19th centuries. Shakespeare did it. Here’s Ferdinand, prince of Naples, in The Tempest: “This Musicke crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury, and my passion / With it’s sweet ayre . . . ” The usage is wrong now. It wasn’t then”.

“It’s common practice to refer to p’s and q’s rather than ps and qs. Simon Heffer of the Times clarifies this. He writes: “Plurals require no apostrophe, though I would make one exception for the sake of clarity: which is when one is writing about individual letters of the alphabet.” “That’s sensible.

“What should determine use of the apostrophe is clarity. It’s how the mark came into written English in the first place”. And it is for this very reason of clarity that we use an apostrophe in Night of the 10,000m PB’s.